Leadership

One word, with so many different meanings and nuances! What does it mean to you? How has your own perspective of leadership evolved over the years? How does leader development differ from leadership development? How are you building the collective leadership capacity of your organisation?

If you are a leader, a coach who works with leaders, a leadership development specialist, an organisation… these are questions you would have no doubt have explored.

Whilst leadership thinking and practices have shifted over the years, there is no single way to lead or a one size fits all approach to leadership. Flexibility, agility and adaptability are essential in facing the challenges of the moment.

How often do you make time to reflect on mindsets, behaviours, skills – looking back to move forward and looking forward to leverage and learn from the past?

When I started out in my career (some while ago!), the focus was on individual leaders –  transformational, charismatic, heroic, visionary…. I recall my first managerial role and the weight of responsibility that I felt to not only get things right, but to have all the answers and that I was solely accountable for my team and its performance.

The term ‘hub and spoke’ refers to this style where all information flows through and decisions are made by one individual, the hub. This often results in communication that is slow and filtered.  When the hub is not available, decisions do not get made. Which does not bode well in a complex fast-moving environment where the ability to make quick, cross-functional, collaborative decisions is essential.

This approach creates the illusion that the hub is the smartest person in the room, and I certainly wasn’t!

Moving on, I was tasked with leading my department through a large scale transformational change which I soon found required a different approach. Providing a clear direction, connecting to purpose and values, harnessing strengths, supporting and developing colleagues (we didn’t use the word, ‘coaching’ back then!) and giving them more autonomy, not only lightened the load but increased our progress and performance along with engagement and satisfaction.

Leading teams of teams across geographically spread locations brought home the power of teams and effective team working. I found through experimentation that by spreading the leadership out and supporting more colleagues to develop and practice leadership, our performance not only improved but so did our people metrics. Shifting from the who (me as the leader) to how leadership is being accomplished was an enlightening moment.

A stint as a Lecturer in Leadership provided fertile ground to explore leadership and its many perspectives. What is Leadership: Person, result, position, purpose or process, or all or none of these? by Keith Grint et al (2016) makes interesting reading.

Historically, leader development is about developing individuals in leadership roles – an investment in the human capital of selected individuals.

Leadership development is concerned with the development of the collective leadership capacity of the organisation.  It is an investment in the social capital through collaboration, networks, cooperation within and between people in the organisation (Day 2000). Whilst both are equally important, it is often the former which is focused on.

In drawing out significant themes in leadership, Bolden et al (2011) describe leadership as:

A process

Of social influence

To guide, structure, and /or facilitate

Behaviours, activities and /or relationships

Towards the achievement of shared aims

Running my own consulting business, cemented the importance of trust, authenticity, values, purpose, empathy in not only leader/leadership development but in being human. You don’t put your ‘leadership’ hat on when you go to work and take it off when you return. It is fundamentally part of who we are 24/7. Working across industry sectors with different organisations provided exposure and insights which resulted in an alignment with servant leadership.

“When we talk about leaders, we too often think about an individual with specific abilities. But no one can do everything. Leadership is a team sport. What’s really at stake here is finding the right combination of complementary talents”. Manfred Kets de Vries

Katzenbach and Smith in their seminal book, The Wisdom of Teams define a team as a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed in a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

Is there a way where everyone on the team can be responsible for the team – for its collective development, performance, governance, support, learning…?

In one of my previous roles, I was part of a self- managed team. There was no leader. We are all equally capable, with similar levels of expertise, skills and qualifications.

In shared leadership, team members act as leaders and followers at different times, enabling the team to leverage the expertise of each member at different times and in different ways.

The Grammy award winning Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is an example of this collaborative, collective, distributed approach.  It has no conductor. The 34 musicians work together as a collective, and rotate leadership roles for all works performed including programming and governance.

Research on 62 teams across a variety of organisations found that those teams who shared leadership had higher team task performance which was gained through harnessing the diverse knowledge, skills and ability of each team member.

Collective / distributed / shared leadership is a systemic approach to leadership. It is a process which is dependent on the relationships among the parts in the system. With a shared purpose and a collective commitment to achieving that purpose, along with shared accountability and responsibility, this approach requires a shift from I to we, from hierarchy to networks, from individual to collective.

This is where I have landed with my thinking and practice. It emphasises the importance of interconnectivity, teamwork, collaboration, mobilising leadership expertise at all levels, networks…

It is also why I am an advocate of team coaching. Utilising this thinking with teams who buy into this approach has yielded some remarkable results,

Love to hear your thoughts/ perspectives about my post 😊

Leader, coach, organisation, leadership consultant….. how you have evolved and where you  have currently landed…